


The Floating Man

by ballantine



Series: Thought Experiments [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Mostly Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 06:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5775349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn gets himself recruited. It's not as simple as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Floating Man

_One must suppose that he was just created at a stroke, fully developed and perfectly formed but with his vision shrouded from perceiving all external objects - created floating in the air or in the space. Then let the subject consider whether he would affirm the existence of his self._

\- Avicenna, The Book of Healing

 

The scars on his back and shoulder don’t pull at his muscles or hamper his movement, but he can feel them just the same. A very literal etching into his skin of how recent events have changed him — maybe forever, he can’t say for sure yet. He’s not used to projecting that far into the future.

Rey’s absence feels the same as the scars. He hasn’t known her long enough to miss, not really, but he’s had a lifetime of missing a family he can’t remember. So this emotion, the nagging awareness that something important is gone? Well, it’s not an unfamiliar one.

When he first woke up, they told him where she’d gone and he said, “What _, how_?”

They filled him in on what happened down on Starkiller Base, how Rey held her own against Kylo Ren, which hadn’t surprised him, and that she’d done it using the Force, which had. And he said, “Oh.”

Then they said no one knew when she’d return, and he said nothing for a while.

—

“Cheer up,” BB-8 says before darting in front of his legs. It’s only through recently acquired reflexes that he avoids stumbling; BB-8 does this frequently, usually when it’s looking for Poe.

As if Poe didn’t attract enough attention as it is without minor collisions constantly taking place in his vicinity.

They are just outside the mess hall, in one of the only corridors Finn is familiar with on the base. The other two lead to the medibay and a small courtyard near his temporary quarters that is filled with sunshine and open-faced flowering bushes for two hours early every morning.

Poe looks up from where his droid is chirping and a smile breaks over his face. It’s like a tractor beam, and Finn doesn’t resist its pull, redirecting his steps until he is suddenly alongside the commander.

“Lunch?” Poe suggests. BB-8 says something and he says without looking down at it, “Hush,” and then to Finn: “Sorry.”

Finn shrugs easily and says, “I’m stilling learning binary. Only get one word in three on a good day.” He eyes BB-8 and asks, “What did it say?”

“That’s it’s already recharged. An old and very tired joke,” this last addressed down at the droid, who spins around the two of them in an unrepentant circle.

The mess hall is emptier than usual, everyone on strange schedules now that the Resistance is in full evacuation mode. There is still a week’s worth of work left, but most critical machinery and personnel have already been moved on ahead. Finn isn’t sure why Poe is still hanging around.

They collect a couple plates of fruit and protein cubes and commandeer a table close to the windows that overlook the garden.

“Have you given any more thought to coming with us?” Poe asks him. His gaze is trained down on his apple, his hands deftly using a pocket knife to peel it in one long, curling strand.

The truth is, Finn has thought of little else.

The old option of fleeing to the Outer Rim is still there, but with every passing day it looks more and more unappealing, the refuge of a desperate man. When he’d first made his decision, he’d been running on the fumes of panic, the smell of the the _Finalizer_ still clinging to his clothing under Poe’s jacket. He wasn’t thinking long term, he was just thinking _get away_.

But he has no money or connections. His knowledge of the Outer Rim systems only includes details of their natural resources and defense capabilities (his training hadn’t exactly included primers on how to blend in with local cultures). General Organa has already made offer of a connection on Tatooine, but damned if he wants to spend another second of his life on a desert planet.

What’s the alternative, though — join the Resistance? He just barely extracted himself from fighting one war, is he really going to throw away his chance at a life to go right back to _yessir-_ ing and killing?

To Poe, he says, “A little.” And then, because his mind has never obeyed commands to leave well enough alone, he asks, “Is that why you’re still here? Trying to recruit me?”

Poe huffs a laugh. “I’m here to guide the final ships to our new base — it’s a need-to-know location at the moment. Don’t want a random supply ship getting lost and captured.”

Finn nods, ready to accept the answer at face value, but then Poe pauses and looks up from his tray. “And — I _am_ trying to recruit you.” He says it with a grin, but his eyes are serious. He’s not joking.

Finn doesn’t say anything at first. Buys himself some more time by pointing out, “You won’t have any shortage of volunteers after what happened to the Hosnian system.”

Poe shrugs and nods. “Sure, and the provisional governments of a few Republic planets have already reached out to us. But you don’t win a war just through numbers, Finn.” He points his pocketknife at Finn and winks, “You win with the proper application of intelligence and strategy.”

A prickle of discomfort registers as he tries to work out Poe’s angle. “You think I could be useful.”

He is surprised when Poe leans forward into his space. “No, I think you could be brilliant.”

Finn has never told anyone other than Solo and Chewie that he’d lied about knowing how to disable the shield generator on Starkiller Base, that he’d just been trying to get Rey out. Looking at Poe’s earnest expression, he suddenly wishes he had. He knows all about the power of belief, and the last thing he wants is someone placing any in him for something he isn’t.

“I don’t have any more intel for you to use,” he says, the words coming in a rush. “I was still pretty low in the ranks when I ran — Jakku was my first time seeing any action. I don’t — I don’t know anything.”

Poe sits back and regards him for a moment. He doesn’t look upset or impatient with Finn’s confession, just thoughtful.

Eventually he says, “You know, when you found me on that Destroyer, I thought I was done for. Kylo Ren and I were never what you might call friends and I thought — I _knew_. That he would take his time.” His expression is grim; Finn hadn’t thought Poe’s face was even capable of looking so bitter.

He wonders what fate Poe imagined awaiting him before Finn showed up. He wonders if Poe’s imagination is half as bad as the reality.

Poe continues, “When you first took me aside, I thought you were one of ours — a Resistance operative, miraculously materializing just in time to save me. I, uh, wasn’t thinking too straight.”

Finn wants to lighten the mood, flash a grin and say something like, _probably would have gone a lot smoother if I had been_ , but he remains silent, his teeth seemingly cemented together.

“But you told me — I’ll never forget, because it just blew me away — you said, _no,_ I’m _breaking you out_. Just you. Just. One stormtrooper out of the thousands on that ship. One man suddenly deciding to disobey orders. That’s what we call a game changer, Finn.”

Finn should remind Poe of the part of their first conversation he’s forgetting. He barely remembers it himself; his body was flooded with adrenaline, synapses firing as he calculated route and timing to avoid as many patrols as he could. He’d scrambled to think about what he could say to convince the pilot to help, what might convince a Resistance fighter. What came out was simplistic nonsense, transparent even to a man who’d been tortured not less than an hour beforehand. _Because it’s the right thing to do._

He’s only ever done the right thing by incident or accident. Except for Rey. That time, it was deliberate.

Finn finds his voice. “There was nothing — heroic about it. I just wanted out.”

“Exactly.” Poe smiles and it just serves to confuse him further. “You wanted out, Finn. That spark, not only to _want_ out but to _get_ out — You could look through tens of thousands of people, and you wouldn’t find it. Not in the First Order. Not even in the Resistance.”  

He gets to his feet and looks down at Finn with a bit-lip smile. “Look, I won’t pretend to know exactly how the First Order works. You probably know better than me that they want foot soldiers, people who will blindly obey. People who will be, as you say, useful.

With an easy clap on his shoulder, as if he isn’t shaking the foundation under Finn’s feet, Poe says, “What we want is _you_.”

—

From the moment he made the insane decision — and some fading part of his brain is still telling him it was _insane, you’re insane, FN-2187_ — to boost a Resistance pilot and fly off into the Western Reaches in a short-range TIE fighter, Finn had been in a mild state of panic.

He doesn’t know how he woke himself up on Jakku, whether it was the loss of Slip or the bone-shaking chaos of the firefight, but afterwards he knew instinctively he needed to get away — far away from the reach of the First Order, somewhere where he could collect himself. Learn himself again.

Now that Finn is free and all healed up, an old familiar restlessness has started creeping back. It’s the same speeding of his thoughts that made his instructors curse him out and assign him punishment details when he was younger.

“Your mind’s too changeable,” they told him once, four hours into his recitation of dogma, when he was allowed a minute break to drink some water. “It leaps and bounds like a _durni_ , fast but blind to the trouble coming.”

He thinks now they must have been right all along, because his thoughts are currently leading him into dangerous territory. Territory that involves Poe and the Resistance and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other soldiers again.

If he joins up with the Resistance, how long before he’s put back in the path of the First Order? Infiltrating Starkiller Base had been one long nightmare of worrying that his conditioning might somehow kick back in. He still thinks the only thing that stopped his thoughts from being stolen away again was his desperate need to save Rey from the same fate.

He’s only just clawed his personhood back. He thinks he shouldn’t be so willing to throw it away again, even for Poe.

—

That night, alone in a too-quiet room, Finn dreams fitfully.

He’s standing with Rey in the forest outside Maz Kanata’s castle, trees whispering and green all around them. There are no ships, no invading division of stormtroopers. It’s just them.

Rey smiles and reaches out to cup his face. Her hand is delicate and warm; the callouses on her fingers and palm catch against his stubble. He draws her in with light fingertips on her waist. It feels natural, though he’s never done anything like it before.

Her breath ghosts along his jawline and he turns his head automatically, seeking, waiting. His heart should be pounding but all he feels is a strange peacefulness. He blinks, slow and heavy, and in the space between, Rey changes —

She is pulled back by some unseen force. Her hand comes up in a terrible, familiar formation, one he’s seen Kylo Ren use countless times on anyone unfortunate enough to be close by when his temper snapped. Her face contorts and she’s shaking her head, struggling, but her mind’s already punching into his, tearing through his memories and coding, diving into the very heart of him. And now she can see it, the great echoing _emptiness_ —

When Finn jerks back to wakefulness, his cheeks are wet and he’s impossibly hard.

Limbs shaking and stomach sick, he ignores his dick and curls up on his side. He breathes into the darkness, meditative techniques ingrained in him from a young age, _breathe in, one-two-three-four, breathe out, one-two-three-four_. He tries to keep his mind blank.

He doesn’t sleep again that night.

—

Over the course of the rest of the week, Finn goes about his days as if there isn’t a countdown to his berth on D’Qar. He’s not used to having so much unregimented time. It makes the hours pass very slowly.

He does his physical therapy with the medi-droid. He studies the star charts and schema of Outer Rim planets. He sits in the courtyard near his room and tries to get used to the feeling of sun and wind on his face. He talks to Poe.

The other man doesn’t mention Finn joining up again directly, but he does talk about the Resistance frequently. Finn doesn’t think it’s because he’s trying to pressure him, but because he’s Poe Dameron —  Black Leader, best damn pilot in the Resistance, and General Organa’s favorite commander. Finn isn’t honestly sure that Poe knows another topic to talk _about_.

“They should have you down on street corners on Coruscant, passing out flyers,” Finn tells him one day. “You’re wasted here, man.”

It’s not true, almost absurdly so, and they both know it; Poe smiles and Finn can’t help but grin back.

Despite all his fervency for the cause, Poe is somehow easy to talk to — impossibly easy. Finn thinks sometimes that he should find Poe’s single-minded devotion to the Resistance off-putting — that it should remind him of First Order officers, the ones who didn’t need to be conditioned because their families had already raised them in the life. The difference in his feelings nags him until he works out an answer.

When General Hux delivered his orations to the base, the words weren’t ever the important part — Finn and the others in the back rows didn’t even really hear them after a while. What they heard was Hux’s _voice_ , seething red like the base’s energy beam, obliterating all outside thoughts and possibilities.

First Order gospel always bleeds together until it is just pure sound, washing over and around Finn’s body like the waves of an ocean, lifting him up and carrying him further and further away from solid land.

Poe is never like that. When Poe speaks, Finn wants to hear the words.

He wants to speak back.

—

“She said — see you — ”

Finn is walking through the deserted base, BB-8 at his side. The droid’s whirling movements and his steps echo ahead of them down the corridor.

He has to ask BB-8 to repeat itself three times over before he can understand the words, and even then he feels like he’s reading too much into its expressive beeps and trills. The repair droids back on Starkiller Base had little need for any emotion protocols, but he still always thought of them as fearful and skittish. He’s on record for being over-empathetic like that.

What BB-8 said, maybe, was: _she said she’d see you again_.

“I don’t understand why she didn’t go back to Jakku,” Finn says. It’s the first time he’s verbalized his confusion, and he’s glad it’s to BB-8 and not another person. “It seemed so important to her.”

Important enough to insist on getting back to that miserable place even in the midst of being hunted by the First Order. But maybe that’s what the Force does — changes people, warps their priorities. Just look at Kylo Ren. He was apparently the General and Solo’s _son_.

(BB-8 trills lowly at him again, something about a mouth or his forehead. He doesn’t understand, so he ignores it.)

Maybe she simply changed her mind. People who aren’t raised by the First Order probably don’t think of that being such a big deal. And on the heels of that thought, inevitably and immediately, comes: I’m not in the First Order anymore. If she can change her mind, why can’t I?

The last time he and Rey had a chance to talk without running for their lives, he said _come with me._ She replied _don’t go_. An impasse, neither of them used to having much in the way of choice.

Now she is the one who’s gone and he is wondering if he should stay.

Figures.

—

“Why do you do all this?” he asks Poe on the last day.

The other man is already in his flight suit, looking wiry and capable. They are sitting on the edge of the airfield entrance overhang, watching the ground crew prep the last ships.

Poe laughs, “I thought you would be sick of hearing me talk about the Resistance by now.”

“I don’t want to hear about the Resistance,” Finn agrees. He nudges him with his elbow, a touch so casual, it would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. “I want to hear about you.”

A flash of startlement crosses Poe’s face. He looks over at Finn with dark eyes.  

“Well. My mother was a starfighter pilot,” He says slowly, eventually. “But she didn’t really talk about it — I mean, what do you say about the war to a six-year-old?”

When Finn was six, the First Order told him they had rescued him from a false government that had slaughtered his whole family. They did not spare any details, and he still doesn’t know how much was truth or fabrication. But he thinks he understands what Poe means, how it’s supposed to be.

“Anyway,” Poe says, looking out over the airfield. “When I got old enough, I looked up her war record. It was kind of a surprise to read.” He turns and looks at Finn, eyes squinting in the late angled sun. “She didn’t die for the Republic, but she certainly lived for it, you know? I always knew I wanted to be a pilot, but after that — it just seemed like the thing to do. Maybe to be closer to her.” A beat and then: “And because the First Order are a bunch of genocidal thugs, of course. That kind of helped.”  

Finn snorts lightly and nods. He studies Poe, thinking, for the first time, that maybe the reason they connect so easily is because neither of them know how to define themselves outside of the conflict.

Poe glances at him and away, a slight splash of red across his face. He clears his throat. “Well — whichever freighter you get on, keep in touch. Yeah?”

By the time Finn’s surprise settles into pleasure, Poe has gotten to his feet. With a grin and a wink, he tosses something into Finn’s lap and then walks off toward the hangar, one hand raised in farewell.

Finn looks down; it’s his jacket.

He unfolds it, runs a hand over the back where it was damaged. The line of the lightsaber is starkly obvious, but the leather has been carefully treated and sewn back together. Forever changed, but still fundamentally the same.

 

He said once before that he has nothing to fight for and managed to prove himself wrong within the day. He did that for Rey. He thinks he can do it for Poe.

He wonders what other reasons he might find, if he gives himself the time.


End file.
